Men of All Seasons
by Idrelle Miocovani
Summary: The line between cop and criminal was blurred - and in the end, when you had a gun pointed at your head and you were seconds away from death, did it really matter which one you were?


**A/N: **I'm currently experimenting with a style of writing called a "50 Sentences" challenge – you are given a table of fifty prompts and have to write _one_ sentence to go with each prompt. Naturally, sometimes the grammar gets a bit flimsy, but it's a fun exercise. For 2011, I am writing a series of 50 Sentences challenges (four per month) covering many different fandoms and characters. Since I couldn't find a decent category to put the series in (this really isn't a crossover, so the crossover options are out), I am posting each entry separately in its own fandom. This is the fourth ficlet in the series, and if you'd like to keep track of them, there's an index in my profile listing the titles and fandoms of them all.

I watched The Departed for the first time on New Year's Eve, and I don't know what it is, but that film really struck me in a way that no film has in a while. And then I had a set of writing challenge prompts sitting around and my imagination kind of just ran with it. Thanks for reading!

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**Men of All Seasons**

**1. Verse**

It was sickening whenever Costello slipped some line from Shakespeare or Chaucer or whatever other fucking ancient writer into the conversation – as if he was legitimizing his felonies by association with greater men, as if he were a great man himself.

**2. Visualize**

As the days passed, Billy continually surprised himself by staying alive, as if he was daring himself to keep standing, keep breathing; but there was only one way he could ultimately see this ending, and that was with a bullet in his brain.

**3. Vocalize**

Out here in hell, they didn't need to talk – in hell, if they wanted something, they used another man's body to send the message.

**4. Veil**

He was stained with the blood of countless other men, men who were worse than him, men who were better than him – but who the fuck was he to determine better from worse?– him, the man who used the blood of others to hide himself, hide better, hide deeper, right in front of his enemies' eyes.

**5. Victim**

Good men died as easily as bad men: in a world as gone to shit as this one, did the line between villains and victims really matter when they were all just the same thing?

**6. Volunteer**

No one forced him to take this job – and fuck, this was the last time he was ever allowing himself to get talked into something he _knew_ he should stay out of.

**7. Vicissitude**

His instincts told him they were fucked when he noticed that Queenan was tailed; he should have backed out, he should have run, called it off, but it took the Captain's plunge off the roof to show him how hellish this was becoming – a realisation far too late to save a good old man's life.

**8. Vocabulary**

There was something about adrenaline-high situations that made men's vocabulary shrink by eighty percent, and their language skills, Madolyn concluded, could be summed up as "fuck".

**9. Vociferous**

Billy screamed through the phone at the idiots safe in their office, a detached part of his mind wondering whether someone would hear him, hear his words and blow his cover to Costello – but in this moment, he didn't care.

**10. Vitrine**

People were fragile, like glass – throw them off a roof and they, too, would be irreparably shattered.

**11. Veteran**

Queenan and Dignam said that people did this every day, but Billy heard an emphasis on _people_, with the deaths of hundreds of undercover cops hanging above the word, and he knew that there was no such thing as an experienced undercover cop – no one could possibly live long enough to escape the first job and want to take a second.

**12. Vestige**

He didn't know who he was anymore, and even if he did survive long enough to finish the job and get out, Billy doubted he would ever recover his true identity; William Costigan Jr was lost forever, and only a shadow wearing his face remained.

**13. Valve**

Information was power – more than guns, more than drugs, more than fucking microprocessors – and that was why finding the rat was more important than anything.

**14. Visor**

Out of all the varied clients she saw, Madolyn found cops the most intriguing: they hid everything, their emotions clamped tight until they reached her office, and broke down like children waking up screaming from a nightmare.

**15. Volt**

It was all about survival in a nest of hornets – to stay alive with hornets, you had to be a hornet, and that meant being one step faster than everyone else.

**16. Vogue**

The image of a cop was popular, but that was because people didn't really _know_ what cops did; if anyone knew the measures cops would take to defend the idealistic views of the American nation, Billy knew the image of a cop wouldn't be quite so fascinating to anyone who objected getting riddled with bullets.

**17. Veneer**

His cover never broke once, and whether that was due to carefulness (questionable) or pure luck (plausible, but still fucked), Billy didn't know – at this point, his job was to concentrate on being the best in Costello's crew, to the point where his ambition to be a _real_ cop was only a little bit more than a dream.

**18. Vanity**

Policemen were the vainest creatures in the world, Dignam thought with a chuckle – it was remarkable any of them weren't thrown off balance by their inflated egos.

**19. Vanilla**

Madolyn wasn't special – with low wages for someone with that many degrees, she was just another police shrink, one in the ranks of thousands of listened to the whining voices of idiot assholes who pulled the trigger and couldn't stand the sight of what they'd signed up for – but as the only person Billy could talk to with any sense of his former self, that just about made her goddamn extraordinary.

**20. Villain**

When it came to pulling the trigger and sending a bullet ricocheting through someone else's brain, it didn't matter whether your reasons held the moral high ground or served as a means to an end – at the end of the day, you walked off into the sunset alive, and someone else was dead.

**21. Visit**

She told herself again and again that she could not see Billy, she could not be a friend to him – but part of her was _happy_ when he came to her office unexpectedly, apologies flying from his mouth before she could even speak, eyes still blazing with the burning intensity only he possessed.

**22. View**

He considered running, near the beginning, when it started to become too much, but even then he knew two things with absolutely certainty: just being William Costigan's son in this neighbourhood was a step too far into the mob, and the best place to hide from Costello was the seat across the table from him.

**23. Virtuous**

In the past six months, Madolyn was the only person he had spoken to with any sense of virtue or honour or whatever the fuck people called it, and he couldn't even see her anymore – no wonder he was fucked.

**24. Vignette**

"Who's my dad?" was the question Madolyn feared the most as she contemplated her son's future – but she knew the day would come when "a cop" wouldn't be a satisfactory answer… and then what would she say when she herself didn't know the answer?

**25. Valour**

In the end, it was poor, unknown, shadowy Billy Costigan who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Merit and was said to have died with honour; the same could not be applied to Colin Sullivan – popular, handsome, smooth Colin who died unflatteringly in his apartment and posthumously denounced as Costello's mole in SIU.

**26. Virtuoso**

"There's only one good reason why we've gotten this far," Sullivan bellowed into his phone, "and that's because I'm fucking good at what I do!"

**27. Vacant**

Billy backed away, slamming himself against the wall as he stared, speechless and horror-struck by the empty expression of the bloodied man whom he had just mercilessly beaten.

**28. Vanished**

People disappeared: sometimes the mob was behind it, sometimes the police, and sometimes, Billy thought, both were responsible.

**29. Veer**

He had planned to do things calmly, until he heard the rat Sullivan's voice and something in him exploded – somehow, cuffing and beating the shit out of him seemed like a much more necessary option than just taking it slowly.

**30. Voyeur**

In this hell-hole there wasn't much of a difference between cops and criminals – neither flinched when they blew some guy's head off, but their level of enjoyment of such an act drew the faint line between the two sides of the same coin… and Costello was fully satisfied with the side he had chosen for himself.

**31. Vital**

Every man had a trait that defined him, like Dignam's crass attitude or Queenan's own faith in loyalty, and Billy Costigan's double-sided childhood was his – and fortunately or unfortunately, that trait made him the perfect man for the job, too good to pass up if they were ever going to catch Costello.

**32. Vaudevillian**

When Costello killed man, he didn't just _kill_ a man – he made it a performance, the art of squeezing every last inch of terror out of his victims, their lips begging for mercy even as their brains were blown out.

**33. Vivified**

Even though Colin refused to let Madolyn re-decorate the apartment when she moved in, just having her in the house made it brighter, somehow – and he liked it.

**34. Violation**

The loss of his identity was worse than any of the beatings he had suffered or given; worse than Madolyn leaving him for the better; worse than the day his mother died; worse than the day he was given this fucking job – he was no one now, a cop who wasn't a cop, and Sullivan was to blame.

**35. Volant**

At first, Costello had done it for the money and the drugs, the things that gave him freedom – but now, he did it for the game… the game was the only freedom he needed.

**36. Voice**

For months he had been telling her lies and half-lies, substituting his real experiences in Costello's mob with fictional ones he made up on the way to her office – except sometimes the stories were true, disguised with different names and places… and when he told her those veiled truths, that was when he felt the most like himself.

**37. Vice**

Sullivan had thought sometimes, late at night, of just how easy it would be for him to bring Costello down and all the achievements he would receive, but he could never bring himself to do it: Frank meant too much to Sullivan to destroy him.

**38. Vindicate**

The truth came out when Billy died and the pieces fell into place for Madolyn – she had always had a suspicion that he wasn't quite what the records said he was… and she felt a strange mixture of sadness and satisfaction knowing that an ex-cadet with assault charges was not the man she had known.

**39. Volcanic**

The moment of realisation of Sullivan's true identity had been a quiet one, like the calm before the storm – and then everything was set in motion to go to hell.

**40. Voyage**

Billy wrestled Sullivan into the elevator, swearing loudly and struggling to maintain control as the rickety capsule slid down to the bottom level – and then the doors opened and everything was black and empty and… gone.

**41. Votive**

Queenan looked pensively at Billy Costigan, frowning: most of the time, moles were sacrifices for the greater good, and he wasn't sure if he could take the responsibility for sending good, young men to their deaths for much longer.

**42. Verdict**

There were a lot of strange, slightly suspicious looks as Billy waited in Sullivan's office: he could care less what these cops thought of him, he was done here forever as soon as they gave him what he wanted.

**43. Veracity**

Billy shouted and shouted and would keep yelling until Brown dropped the gun and saw what was right in front of him: Sullivan, Costello's rat.

**44. Verbose**

"You know what I don't get?" Billy said on his first trip to Madolyn's office. "You shrinks can't say anything normal without sounding like a fucking dictionary."

**45. Visage**

She always asked him "is it real?" at least once when he saw her – he always sad yes, but there was only one time when he actually meant it, when it wasn't an act.

**46. Vain**

Sullivan had always had everything given to him on a silver platter – no wonder he was the most arrogant cop in the force, and everyone still waved his suffocating ego aside with a smile.

**47. Violence**

"Oh, fuck… oh, _God…"_ His hands were red, he was splattered with blood, and this time no amount of soap and water would get rid of it.

**48. Variable **

Billy had seen a lot of terrible things he wished to God he could forget, but even after everything he had done or seen other do at Costello's word, nothing could have prepared him for Queenan's body falling out of the sky right in front of him.

**49. Void**

For most of her pregnancy, Madolyn felt like a walking paradox: she had a life growing inside her, filling her, changing her in mysterious ways, but when she thought of this child's father – or who he could be – she felt a crushing emptiness that simply refused to go away.

**50. Vendetta**

Events moved rapidly after the 344 Wash murders – and as everyone had forgotten about Dignam, that made it easier for him to break into Sullivan's apartment, gun in hand, and wait for the blade to fall.

_fin_


End file.
